Conventionally, materials produced by microbes have been used as a source of new medical development. Explorations have been made to seek such microbes producing useful materials.
Further, useful materials have been produced by culturing microbes introduced genes for cording useful materials (transformant) by using recent genetic recombination technologies.
In addition, in the food industry, a variety of foods have been manufactured by fermentation using microbes. Thus, in the fields of medicine, biochemistry, food, chemistry, etc., microbes play an important role and are kept carefully because clone microbes are valuable sources. Generally, these microbes are stored by a stab culture method, a freezing method, a freeze-drying method, etc.
Research institutions storing the above-mentioned microbes carry the microbes when they are asked to supply the microbes by other research institutions.
Usually, Transportation of microbes is carried out by spotting a culture solution of microbes to paper filter and wrapping with packaging wraps, or containing in ampoule. In case of a large number of microbes, the culture solution is dividedly poured into a micro-titer plate and sealed with a vinyl sheet or spot inoculated in agar medium.
Known multiwell plates for use of microbes are referred to Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 2001-218575 and Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 2002-199874.
However, the above-mentioned methods for carrying microbes absorbed with filer papers have problems of contamination and are ineffective because the number of paper filters increases in case of large number of microbes.
With regard to the methods of micro-titer plate, agar medium or ampoule transportation, there is a problem of container breakage, which further causes a problem of microbe contamination, and also there is a problem of bulky.
In order to solve the above-mentioned problems, the applicants of the present application proposed a thin multiwell plate (Japanese Patent Application 2003-359534). This multiwell plate is superior enough to achieve the object. However, this multiwell plate requires to be replicated by inverting to contact with a culture medium and the like when they are used. For this reason, a position relation between strains on the multiwell plate and replicated strains on the culture medium is a mirror relation and there was a possibility of misidentifying the positions of the strains.
The present invention to solve the problems provides a thin multiwell plate which simply and safely carries and stores a number of microbes and which is devised in such that the position of multiwell plate corresponds to that of replicated ones.